Michael Winterbottom Quotations

A lot of the aspects of the world of the film are amalgams of things that already exist.

I still enjoy watching films more than making them.

If you make a film set in London or in Pakistan or wherever, the thing that interests me is the relationships between individuals - individuals and society, individuals and their family, their girlfriend or boyfriend, it's all the same idea.

I don't particularly like the idea that there's an arc to the story and that therefore in this scene you have to convey this bit of information or emotion. I like more the feeling that, of course, there is a shape to the story, but that each scene should feel right, should be true at that moment, and that gradually you accumulate these moments of truth until you get enough of them together that it becomes a story that's interesting.

I think it would be impossible if you had a name like mine not to get a little flack for it.

There's still a 1950s view of cinema, that there's one audience and they all want to see the same thing.

I prefer to take actors and put them in real settings and real locations and real situations rather than create artificial locations that serve the characters. It's just much easier when you are walking down the street with your actors to do that in a real street that's still open with people on it, rather than to close it off and bring in extras.

There's really only three people that should get any prize because of this film and that's the three people whose story it was.

The starting point was to tell (about) these three people, not to tell the general political situation. All the images you see - it's hard to know whether it's deliberate or not, they sort of dehumanize the people there, you don't have any sense of what they're like.

The film tries to tell their story. We are trying to show what happened to them from their point of view. They are normal people simply caught up in events.